Re: Lilypond lobbying?

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> 2011/8/22 Christ van Willegen <address@hidden>:
>> 2011/8/22 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
>>> What would be the point of using LilyPond then, if all the beautiful
>>> formatting will be lost?
>>
>> Keyboard entry?
>
> For many people it's a disadvantage.
> Certainly entering notes on a virtual staff paper has some advantages.
>
>
> 2011/8/22 Urs Liska <address@hidden>:
>> Am 22.08.2011 14:23, schrieb Janek Warchoł:
>> The point is to be more open in a bidirectional exchange.
>> This option would allow to write scores in LilyPond even when you for some
>> reason or the other are obliged to produce Finale/Sibelius files.
>
> Of cource i support bidirectional exchange!  It'll be very good to
> have the possibility to convert LilyPond scores to finale scores in
> case such need arises.  I only don't see much sense in writing score
> in LilyPond with the intention of converting it to finale right from
> the start.  I think it would be more reasonable to do it altogether in
> finale.

I tend to tackle complex programming problems on paper first.  According
to your rationale, this is unreasonable as the goal is to run them on a
computer.  But paper better facilitates me thinking about the problem.

When I think of a melody, one reflex is to scribble it down.  Often this
is just dots on some lines, never mind the durations, stems, beams,
whatever.  Lilypond is close to scribbling as you don't need to look at
what you are typing.  With a WYSIWYG program, you are aiming, you are
thinking, you are arranging visually.  That's disruptive.

When I am composing, I want to think as little as possible about what
stuff will look like, or I lose focus.  Lilypond is a help.  Stuff does
not usually look right at first try, but that's not important.  Making
things look right is something I can do when I no longer need to focus
on the music itself.

> I wouldn't stand it if i knew for sure that LilyPond would never be
> accepted in the professional market.

The end product is something that can be typed off if necessary, and
that's not my concern.  I recently wrote an article about chromatic
button accordions with LaTeX and Lilypond-book, and sent the PDF.  They
wanted Word files, so I converted some using LaTeX2RTF and prepared SVG
graphics (of the notes) and JPG (of the pictures) and messed around a
few days trying to get them unmolested into OpenOffice (hint: OpenOffice
does not import scalable graphics in any interchange format), having to
give up finally and sending the SVG separately.  The editor managed to
work with that, and in spite of using the stuff at quite different
scales, there were no artifacts anywhere.  I actually was rather
expecting to see some 72dpi JPG-based staircasing or whatever in spite
of the work I put in, but at least it would not have been my fault.  So
this was a mess and additional work.

But would I have written this thing using Word (and/or Finale?) or
OpenOffice from the start?  No way.  I can't work with that stuff.  It's
completely alien to my way of thinking.  And a steaming heap of
faltering crap, to boot.  Whenever I actually work with some
"industry-leading" software, I am consistently totally thrown
off-balance by seeing a heap of user-unfriendly totally unintuitive
incoherent crap for which it is almost impossible to figure out how to
do things _properly_ (poking them with a stick until they look as though
they did is comparatively easy, but I can't do things that way without
getting ulcers).  If there is a way at all.

I don't get it what makes people pick market leading software.  My
normal stance when I have never touched them is something like "I know
my own tools are peculiar, but I am familiar with them.  I am certain
one could do things well-structured and in a user-friendly manner with
that commercial software, but I don't bother, since I got my workflow
reasonably set up using my peculiar tools".  And eveerybody uses this
software, so it must be reasonably usable.  And when I actually have to
do something with it, it is an incoherent, opaque, unstable crashing
pile of crap that does nothing right.

It's like "Ok, I know it needs skills to have a TeX/LaTeX/Lilypond
workflow where no degradation of graphics and text quality occurs
anywhere in the processing chain, but I have learnt how to treat each
case, the hard way.  This is a dinosaur, after all".  So I take an
uptodate current professional market leading tool, and it blows it.  And
people are used to and happy with it blowing it.  And you look in the
support forums, and people know it is blowing it, but don't really mind.

So no, I don't care what tools will be used for putting my ideas to the
final paper form.  Anybody who does not like my tools can type them off
again for all I care.  Since they are professional editors, they'll be
finished faster than I could do this.

-- 
David Kastrup